This book investigates the return of workers’ self-management in recent decades as responses to recurring neoliberal crises. In particular, the book homes in on worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs), a promising form of workers’ self-organization whereby workers restart troubled, bankrupt, or shuttered companies as cooperatives or other forms of democratic workplace.The book argues that WREs are prefigurative of new forms of work based on equality and sustainability. Framed by the ...

Here is one of the first books to assert that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda-to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Ja...

The global financial crisis has led to a new shop-floor militancy. Radical forms of protest and new workers' takeovers have sprung up all over the globe. In the US, Republic Windows and Doors started production under worker control in January 2013. Later that year workers in Greece took over and managed a hotel, a hospital, a newspaper, a TV channel and a factory.The dominant revolutionary left has viewed workers' control as part of a system necessary during a transition to sociali...

From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions,fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creatinginstitutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. Withspecific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, thispathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often underappreciated historical tra...